Modern Romantic Hero in Wojciech Marczewski’s “Nightmares”

Beata Pieńkowska

Abstract

Wojciech Marczewski’s film Nightmares is placed in the stream of the cinema characterized by, unlike the cinema of moral concern of the 1970s, a kind of magicality, visuality, vividness and even Baroque floridity. Pieńkowska claims that costumes and props used in Nightmares served to exemplify contemporaneity and its problems. She explores phases of the initiation of the main hero (his childish and naive faith in ghosts, magic and witches, experience of death, fascination with eroticism, discovery of the relativity of the world, confrontation of ideals with reality, political interests, social roles, and at last problems concerning religion and worldview). The hero’s personality is termed “Romantic”, i.e. embracing divinity and nothingness: divinity - because of the inspired but blasphemous relationships with God, which might have been caused by the progressing religious crisis, and nothingness - because of doubts and mad trust in poetry, art and love. The hero takes the Romantic road because he is strengthened in his conviction in the power of individuality.